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(Note: This guide on how to insert a placeholder in Word is suitable for all MS Word versions including Office 365)
Microsoft Word has a variety of applications and it offers a variety of features that greatly facilitates creating, formatting, storing, and sharing documents.
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Especially when you create scientific or academic content in Word, there might be a lot of places where you have to provide references to the author or the original text. But, you might not know what to refer to yet. In such cases, you can just enter a temporary text and come back for it later on.
In such a case, you can use placeholder text in the desired location to add citations or other hints which will help the author and user understand the context a little better.
In this article, you will learn what a placeholder is and how to insert a placeholder in Word.
You’ll Learn:
- What is a Placeholder?
- How to Insert a Placeholder in Word?
- Insert a Citation Placeholder
- Delete or Modify the Placeholder
- How to Insert an Image Placeholder in Word?
- Delete the Placeholder Image
- Insert a Citation Placeholder
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What is a Placeholder?
Even though the word “placeholder” comes across as a new term, we have been seeing it for a long time.
From the above image, you can see two text boxes: First Name and Last Name. In the first text box, you can see the text “First Name”. This is called the Placeholder text.
When you fill in your details in a forum or any survey form, you can see the placeholder text. They help offer visual cues and additional information to the user when typing the text. And as soon as you click and start typing the text, the placeholder disappears.
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Technically, a placeholder text is a sample or buffer text which appears or holds its place in a textbox until the relevant text is entered. The placeholder text can take alphabets, numbers, or special characters.
How to Insert a Placeholder in Word?
Let us see how to insert a placeholder in Word documents with the help of a real-time example.
Imagine you are working on a scientific paper. You have done your research and almost completed writing your paper. There will be places where you have to add citations that provide you with additional information about the source material and the author.
Once you create the placeholder, you can come back and alter the text at a later time.
Consider the above example where you have content for 3 papers to be published. You have to add citations from which you have taken the information. Here, we have added the hint to cite inside square brackets [citation].
Depending on the user, the text enclosed within square brackets varies. When the user wants to use this template, they have to enter the desired text in the place of the specified placeholder.
Insert a Citation Placeholder
About the above example, you can add the text placeholder in place of the specified text.
- To insert a placeholder in Word, first, open the Word document.
- Place the cursor in the destination where you want to insert the placeholder text.
- Navigate to References. Under the Citations & Bibliography section, click on the dropdown from Insert Citation and select Add New Placeholder.
- This opens the Placeholder Name dialog box. In the textbox, enter any text which will serve as the tag for the placeholder text. Since we want to insert the placeholder text to replace the “citation”, let us enter “Citation” in the text box.
- Click OK.
Note: In Word, the placeholder tag is a single word and cannot have a space between two words. If you want to add more than one word, it is advisable to use an underscore(_) or hyphen(-).
- This inserts the placeholder where the cursor is placed.
- Now, you can click on the dropdown from the placeholder to edit the citation.
- Once you have added the placeholder, it gets stored in the Citations & Bibliography section. You can click on the Insert Citation dropdown and select the placeholder whenever needed.
Delete or Modify the Placeholder
After inserting a placeholder in Word, you can modify the placeholder depending on your requirements. And if you feel the presence of the placeholder you inserted is a bit unnecessary, you can easily delete them.
- To modify a placeholder, click on the dropdown menu that appears when you select the placeholder text. From the dropdown, you can edit the citation and the source.
- To delete a placeholder, click on the dropdown from the placeholder text and select Convert citation to static text. This converts the placeholder to normal text.
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How to Insert an Image Placeholder in Word?
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When adding images, there might be cases where you will have to insert a placeholder image until there comes a need to insert a more relevant image.
In such cases, you can use the image placeholder to hold the place just like the text placeholder.
- To insert an image placeholder, first, enable the Developer tab. To enable the Developer tab in the Ribbon menu, navigate to File. Click on Options to open the Word Options dialog box. Under the Customize Ribbon category, check the checkbox for Developer and click OK.
Let us now get to inserting the image placeholder.
- Open the Word document and place the cursor in the place where you want to insert the image.
- Now, insert a cell. Navigate to Insert. Click on the dropdown from Table and select 1×1 table.
- This inserts the table in the Word document.
- Click and use the anchor points to resize the cell to the size of the image you want to insert.
- Then, navigate to the Developer tab. Under the Controls section, click on Picture Content Control.
- This inserts the image placeholder in the cell. Stretch the placeholder template to fit the cell using the anchor points.
- To insert an image, click on the icon in the middle of the placeholder template. Choose the method you want to insert the image. In this case, let us insert the image from our local drive.
- This opens the Insert Picture dialog box. Navigate to the file location, select the image, and click Insert.
- This inserts the placeholder in the cell.
- To change the image, click on the Change Picture button. This in turn opens the Insert Pictures dialog box. You can choose the image of your choice and insert them in place of the placeholder image.
Delete the Placeholder Image
- To delete the placeholder image, right-click on the image and select Remove Content Control.
- Then, select the image and press the Delete button.
- Finally, remove the cell by clicking on the four-sided button in the top-left corner of the cell and again pressing the Delete button.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Closing Thoughts
Inserting placeholders in your documents helps in indicating citations or any text you wanted to modify. These placeholders are not like normal text and stand out from the static text. Once inserted, you can use the same placeholder from the Citations repository.
In this article, we saw how to insert a placeholder in Word. You can insert the placeholder as text or an image. Choose the method that suits your needs.
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